


visitation

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Bond Ain't Broken, Boy Ain't Shit, F/M, Get Your Hurt/Comfort Here, The Belonging You Seek is Not Behind You
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 22:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13133994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: “I need you.” Bonds with no need to be broken have no desire to break; minds speak to minds, bodies speak to bodies.





	visitation

I don’t even have to look for you anymore, you’re always here.

“What do you want?”

The brightness is peeling away from your bones, but the light isn’t gone. It’ll never leave you.

“Stop thinking that!”

“Ben –”

“ _Don’t_.” Unstable always, but less in control than you used to be. I see your hand come up, I see your fingers tremble with the effort.

“That doesn’t work on me anymore.”

Pain is carved into you like the lines of a storm in a sand dune, tearing you to pieces. The hand reaching out is a warning, not an invitation.

“Ben…”

But instead of the snap of your forming fist, the ache in your eyes that so quickly turns to Force and fire, you break away. I follow you through a room I don’t recognise though I’m sitting on my cot, noting the frayed fibres at the edge of the blanket from my reality and motes of dust re-circulating in the air from yours.

“I’m the Supreme Leader now.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“That means _everything_.”

I see Leia look back when I look at you, her unspoken present as deep and unexpected as a well in the desert. “You said I was nothing.”

“I said you’re not nothing to me.”

“You prefer me to be nothing. You used the information about my parents to try and make me join you – and you think it was weakness, that I needed to know, when I’m not the one chasing my mother across the galaxy.”

“Stop it!”

You come close and you smell like blood, and you seem like rage. So many people are screaming inside my head, backlit by the flare of one green and one blue lightsaber as you raise yours in what you’ll never stop believing was defence.

“You’re no Snoke.”

“No. I’m stronger. Rey –”

You stretch out your hand, but I won’t be fooled again. To take it is to promise that I will be like you, that I will follow you, that I will rule beside you in the grey. I can’t. “Rey.” I won’t. “ _Rey_.” But I feel your fingers brush my cheek, I feel the bones and the flesh and the energy between. I feel the gulleys dividing your knuckles, the wasting, the waste of you.

“I’m not nothing.”

“You’re no Skywalker.”

“Neither are you.”

That burns through you and into me, a violent rejection of the words that should break us in half. You know who you are, but you tell yourself you killed Snoke for power. You whisper that this was your plan all along, that you don’t need your mask anymore, that you have nothing to hide.

“I can _hear_ you.”

“I know.” Without thinking much about it, I go to push back your hair. That’s Leia’s desire, not mine, but your reaction would be for me. “You can’t hide who you really are forever. I’ve seen it.”

“You saw an option. A possibility.”

“I saw hope.”

“Hope is the last resort of those with nothing to hope for.”

The Falcon thrums into the silence where I am now, outside this room, outside this starship.

“There’s good in you still, I can feel it. You know I can feel it.”

I know when I cross the line, when the sudden jerk of energy you may not have meant for me sets us up for confrontation, your face too close to my face, your words acid.

“Good is weakness. The light is weakness. You are weak and you will fail, and that family you crave? You won’t find it in what’s left of mine. You’ll be this way forever, an orphan from Jakku.”

“Maybe, but I’m not alone.”

“Evidently.”

“You’re not alone, Ben.”

“No. You’re here.”

Your mouth is salty, your lips are bitten past pain and into habit. I’m too tired to question why I kiss you – it’s why I touch your hand, it’s why I’m in this room, it’s Luke and rocks rising all around me like stars falling upwards. It’s that pale core of light, lightning in a fragile shell, the friable centre of your being. It’s that I need you to know that _you are not alone_ , and I make it a vow in the flow of the Force where nothing is impossible.

I wrap my arms around you and you don’t feel alone.

“I will destroy you. I will destroy the Resistance.”

“You’ve failed so far.”

You kiss me like a bite, anger and fear, loneliness and bleak human nature.

“I don’t want to kill you, but I will. Join me.”

“Never.”

“Come to me.”

“No.”

“Then you condemn yourself.”

“The fate of a nothing shouldn’t trouble you.”

“You’re not nothing to me.”

You pull the last tie from my hair, breathe me like you’re scenting for hunting, look into my face and into my head and let the black brightness of oblivion almost blind us both.

“I need you.”

“Not like this.”

I sense the Balance, the dark side and the light, molten magma cooling to rock and exploding into lava, blowing the future sky high.

“I see you. I see your dreams.”

Your heart is not nothing, but something.

“I know.”

Your soul is something.

“I need you.”

If I called them mine, then right might jump between us. Holding you might be easy, right might make it my right.

“I know.” Why do I come here, when the door was closed and I should have had no hope of opening it? Why do I stay, and stand against you with no lightsaber or help, bait the man into overcoming the monster? “But not like this.”

I don’t even have to look for you anymore, you’re always here.


End file.
